Sunday, March 20, 2011

Premiering at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival, where it was honored with the second prize, Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear, Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse(A torinói ló, 2011) advances the aesthetic program of the director's supreme masterpiece Sátántangó(1994), presentinggestures that maintain the same phenomenological plenitude as those depicted in the earlier work, and repeat with maximal regularity and minimal variation over the course of the 2011 film's 146-minute duration. Within The Turin Horse's six-day time-span, Tarr and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky bring to terrible life the bleak daily rituals of his father and daughter protagonists, confined to a single sparely lit and even more modestly appointed room on a perpetually wind-swept Hungarian plain. Each day Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) wake in near darkness, with the latter dressing her physically impaired father before she is forced - in her daily trips to the close-by family well - to face the unceasingly harsh conditions outside their home. As she opens their front door on the second day, the gale's deafening howl smacks the spectator no less than the cold wind and the accompanying wall of dust hits the young female lead as she crosses through the threshold. Back inside, she prepares meal after meal of boiled potatoes - never more or less than two - with her father scraping the skin off the scorching objects using his remaining working hand.

Indeed, it is in Bók's preparation of their day-one meal that Tarr's peculiar registration of gesture manifests itself mostly clearly. Here, Bók does not simply drop the potatoes in the murky water of the stove-top pot before taking them out moments later, following a temporally abridging cut. (The film's lone food item references both Van Gogh's "Potato Eaters" [1885], as the film's directory of photography has confirmed in an interview, and also Chantal Akerman's Modernistmasterpiece of Sisyphusian ritual, Jeanne Dielman, 1975.) Rather, Tarr stays with Bók as she sits beside the stove, staring out their lone window as she - along with the film's viewer - waits for the food to cook. In this regard, Tarr not only portrays the elements of the family's daily ritual, but more importantly, the director further records the (approximate) duration of their enactments; Tarr presents his viewer with facsimiles of the felt experience of his gestures. The Turin Horse's presentation of ritual is in this sense fundamentally phenomenological in nature.

By comparison, Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux, 2010), itself a first runner-up last year at the 63rd annual Cannes Film Festival, opts for a far more conventional presentation of the daily repeated acts of its heroic monks. In Of Gods and Men, much more a work of the humanist art film middle certainly, but one of notable accomplishment nonetheless, the monastic episodes appear in comparatively abbreviated, summary form, verging closer to items on a list - bottling preserves, hoeing a garden, etc. - than to the distended, if comparatively phenomenologically precise articulations of ritual contained in The Turin Horse's modernist art cinema. Frequently bathed in a cool blue-green light that provides the principle visual marker of the naturalistic French idiom from which Of Gods and Men descends, Beauvois and cinematographer Caroline Champetier shoot his ritual-generated, commonly wordless episodes (in this sense the Cannes prize-winner is very much like The Turin Horse; neither however is silent, given the recourse to song in Beauvois's film and the consistently prominent score and sounds of howling wind in Tarr's)in a series of largely static set-ups, with camera movement primarily initiated by and following figural movement. Consummately a work of craft with takes that are longish by commercial standards, Of Gods and Men nevertheless does not match the durational excesses inscribed through Tarr's lengthy set-ups.

***

Tarr and cinematographer Fred Kelemen utilize an astonishingly small number of takes - a mere thirty over the course of The Turin Horse's 146-minute duration - with an average shot-length approaching five minutes. Exemplary of their heavily choreographed strategies is the pivotal, six-and-a-half minute take in which Bernhard (Mihály Kormos) visits with news from the village. The sequence-shot opens with the sound of Bernhard pounding on the door. Entering, he asks Ohlsdorfer for "palinka," with the latter commanding his daughter to fill a bottle for their visitor. Crossing the under-lit space - the filmmakers rely exclusively on natural and on-camera, diegetic light sources - Bók replenishes a bottle in the lower foreground while the men converse at a table situated within a second, background plane. As Bernhard's monologue continues, Bók crosses back to the table, with Kelemen's mobile Steadicam keeping the bottle in the center of the frame. Once at the table, Kormos's Bernhard occupies much of the composition as he continues to speculate.

With Mihály Vig's score increasingly audible, its crescendoing figures marking the passage as a dramatic climax, Tarr and Kelemen zoom slowly into the speaker, where they will remain until he concludes with his diatribe. At this juncture, the backward zooming camera accommodates his listener Ohlsdorfer's response as well as Kormos's departure through the doorway, now present in the rear of the frame. Consequently, Tarr and Kelemen's camera moves with Bók once again as she proceeds to the window, where she will watch as Bernhard disappears into the barren landscape, amid the sharp sounds of the swelling wind outside and its thematically inspired double on Vig's musical accompaniment. (The ubiquity of one or the other or both confirms the condition of chaos that the film inscribes from the outset.) Tarr and Kelemen accordingly have complexly choreographed this verbal torrent in a single, mobile take, reliant on zooms and moving camera work to procure both close-ups and multi-planar longs over the course of its more than six-and-a-half minute running time. The sequence-shot, representative of the filmmakers' strategies throughout, is signature Tarr.

***

Likewise defining is the content of Bernhard's four-plus minute speech - a verbal outpouring that, it should be noted, breaks substantially with the film's comparative lack of verbosity. Reinforcing the cardinality of Friedrich Nietzsche to The Turin Horse's philosophical point-of-view (the film opens with an anecdote about the philosopher and the eponymous horse) and thus to the director's worldview, Tarr and fellow screenwriter László Krasznahorkai provide one of the richest, if less than succinct articulations of the director's personal outlook, reproduced below in its entirety:

Because everything's in ruins. Everything's been degraded, but I could say that they've ruined and degraded everything. Because this is not some kind of cataclysm, coming about with so-called, innocent human aide. On the contrary... It's about man's own judgement, his own judgement over his own self, which of course God has a hand in, or dare I say: takes part in. And whatever he takes part in is the most ghastly creation that you can imagine. Because, you see, the world has been debased. So it doesn't matter what I say because everything has been debased that they've acquired, and since they've acquired everything in a sneaky, underhand fight, they've debased everything. Because whatever they touch - and they touch everything - they've debased. This is the way it was until the final victory. Until the triumphant end. Acquire, debase. Debase, acquire. Or I can put it differently if you like: to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase. It's been going on like this for centuries. On, on and on. This and only this, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, but it has been going on and on. Yet only in one way, like a rat attacks an ambush. Because for this perfect victory it was also essential that the other side... That is, everything that's excellent, great in some way and noble should not engage in any kind of fight. There shouldn't be any kind of struggle, just the sudden disappearance of one side, meaning the disappearance of the excellent, the great, the noble. So that by now these winning winners who attack from the ambush rule the earth, and there isn't a single tiny nook where one can hide something from them, because everything they can lay their hands on is theirs. Even things we think they can't reach - but they do reach - are also theirs. Because the sky is already theirs and all our dreams. Theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence. Even immorality is theirs, you understand? Everything, everything is lost forever! And those many noble, great and excellent just stood there, if I can put it that way. They stopped at this point, and had to understand, and had to accept that there is neither god nor gods. And the excellent, the great and the noble had to understand and accept this right from the beginning. But of course they were quite incapable of understanding it. They believed it and accepted it but they didn't understand it. They just stood there, bewildered but not resigned, until something - that spark from the brain - finally enlightened them. And all at once they realized that there is neither god nor gods. All at once they saw that there is neither good nor bad. Then they saw and understood that if this was so, then they themselves do not exist either! You see, I reckon this may have been the moment when we can say that they were extinguished, they burnt out. Extinguished and burnt out like the fire left to smolder in the meadow. One was the constant loser, the other was the constant winner. Defeat, victory, defeat, victory and one day - here in the neighborhood - I had to realize and I did realize, that I was mistaken, I was truly mistaken when I thought that there has never been and could never be any kind of change here on earth. Because, believe me, I know now that this change has indeed taken place."

Bernhard's argument has affinities, therefore, with a number of philosophical methodologies: namely, deductive/inductive reasoning, hypothetical stipulation and conceptual analysis. It also employs a use of incantatory repetition that recalls the texture of modernist poetry. The combined effect of these strategies is a sense of irreversible totality ('everything has been debased that they've acquired, and since they've acquired everything in a sneaky, underhand fight, they've debased everything') that radiates out from a central source, like ripples in a pond. Unlike traditional cinematic images - which tend to gravitate toward the particular - this kind of philosophical reasoning, which deals only with the universal and the abstract will not accommodate individuals, exceptions, or contingencies. By combining airtight - even airless - logic, with an aesthetic of extreme repetition and abstraction, Tarr seeks to banish specificity from his cinematic world, creating a kind of paradox: a photographic rendering of the horror of the absolute. Tarr continually speaks of everything; the fate described is inescapable.

Of course, the unnamed event has occurred even before The Turin Horse begins ('the change has indeed taken place') with the opening prologue displaying its symptoms both in the horse's described immobility - the anecdote is spoken over a black screen - and in Nietzsche's horrified response. The chaos to which The Turin Horse attests reveals itself only after the fact, through series of plagues - the off-screen horrors in the village, the drying up of the well - brought on by visible (the gypsies) and invisible agents alike; by the time it is encountered, that is by the time it takes a concrete form, its consequences are already irreversible. In this sense, The Turin Horse is a film about everything that is antithetical to a medium that is by its nature particular: constructed on abstract ideas that are articulated in an at best convoluted form - Ohlsdorfer is in some sense right to describe Bernhard's ideas as "rubbish" - Tarr's film continuously references an invisible turning.

This chaos, both described and foretold by Bernhard, is brought to the homestead by the traveling band of gypsies who pronounce ownership over Ohlsdorfer's water. The morning after they are run off by the ax-wielding lead, Bók discovers that their well has in fact run dry. With no other plausible explanation, The Turin Horse compels its spectator to impute this tragic result (this effect) to the ominous appearance of the itinerant group, who appear as the harbinger of a destiny already set in motion. The perpetually waiting leads - they take turns staring out their lone window onto a wind-swept hillside - finally become aware of the pestilence deep into the film's two-and-a-half hour duration. The chaos that is already ubiquitous has at this moment become local. When next they attempt to leave their suddenly water-less farm, some unknown off-camera incident propels them to return as quickly as they have left. The condition reported by Bernhard is inescapable.

***

Of Gods and Men likewise centers heavily on the act of waiting, though in its case the enemy has a name: Islamic extremist terrorists. Beauvois's film opens in an ecumenical ideal where the French monks live in harmony with their poor Muslim neighbors. Michael Lonsdale's Luc serves as a physician who would appear just as comfortable in John Ford's eminent piece of confessional resistance, 7 Women(1966). The Trappists attend local ceremonies where they show maximal respect for their Islamic brothers and sisters, who in turn demonstrate admirable friendship and warmth toward their Christian counterparts. Lambert Wilson's Christian is well versed in the Koran, quoting it to Farid Larbi's comparatively enlightened extremist-killer Ali Fayattia as they are besieged on Christmas Day. As with Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch(2009), Of Gods and Men inscribes a new French reality wherein adherents of the Islamic faith outnumber those who of the Catholic confession. Their shared humanist commitment provides the de facto creed of the film's French public.

However, with local military intervention leading to Ali Fayattia's death, Christian and his fellow monks become victims of terrorist reprisal, taken from their compound as they enjoy their Last Supper to a tape recording of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." Ultimately, they are led onto a misty, snow-covered hillside - here the fog is lyrical embellishment, whereas in The Turin Horse it functions as a metaphysical principle, as a metonymy for the film's hermeneutic resistance - where they are martyred for a faith that ultimately reveals itself in their refusal to leave their Islamic brothers and sisters in their greatest time of need. Beauvois's film in this regard provides a comparatively easy humanist politics, where the film's tragedy is brought on by the actions of military and para-military organizations. On the ground, there is abundant understanding and compassion; again, when terrorist Ali Fayattia comes face to face with the monks on the Christian feast, he reveals himself to be a man of religious tolerance. As a result, Of Gods and Men emerges as a profoundly pacifistic work, where the film's real-life image of apocalypse could be reversed with a broader application of the film's values.

The Turin Horse once more takes a very different perspective, wherein the film's apocalypse is both already upon us and irreversible. While The Turin Horse refuses to name its cataclysm - lending the film an added power and increasing its resonance - a number of suspects nonetheless readily come to mind, from ecological disasters to modern capitalist society to hordes of modern-day barbarians (Islamic extremists) destroying the European Union's 'New Rome.' Foremost among these objects of the film's apocalypse is a post-sacred European civilization, whose implications Nietzsche understood more than a century before Tarr teased them out on screen in his Fin de siècle period piece. In one of the film's final set-pieces, Ohlsdorfer and his daughter prove incapable of keeping a lantern lit, thus providing a negative counter to Tarr's master Andrei Tarkovsky'sNostalghia (1983) dénouement. Where faith remains an option for the deceased Soviet director, in Tarr's world, as in Nietzsche's, 'there is no god nor gods.' When they understood this, and further when they realized that there was no 'good nor bad,' 'they were extinguished, they burnt out.'

Lisa and I would like to thank R. Emmet Sweeney for his material support to this piece. Cinema Guild will release The Turin Horse on a limited basis beginning in early 2012.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Long-time readers of this site, or at least those who have been around since last September, will be familiar by now with my approximately semi-annual statement of contrition for not posting more regularly on Tativille. As always, the exigencies of my professional contact with the medium - that is, as an academic film scholar specializing in the work of Howard Hawks - have curtailed my opportunities and inclination to spend more time fulfilling the role of on-line critic hobbyist. When last I did plea for your forgiveness, the New York Film Festival was looming in the immediate future, providing both the impetus and the subjects to increase my on-line pace. Though there is nothing so concentrated on the current horizon, the spring season for art cinema releases will offer this writer some opportunity to right my latest wrong. (Had I not done so last fall, now would be the time to extol the virtues of 2010's best films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul'sUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Abbas Kiarostami'sCertified Copy; both are currently engaged in their North American theatrical runs.)

In the meantime, allow me to draw your attention to the latest issue of Senses of Cinema, where I have two new pieces, and where Mrs. Tativille, Lisa K. Broad, has a third. Included in the current issue's "Featured Articles" section is my 6,500 word treatment of Ernst Lubitsch's silent comedies, "Transatlantic Auteur: Ernst Lubitsch's Self-reflexive Comedies of Misunderstanding". To borrow Senses of Cinema's description, Transatlantic Auteur is "a detailed analysis of the both the stylistic and thematic continuities, and the fault lines, between the German and Hollywood periods of Lubitsch’s work." Over in the "Cinémathèque Annotations on Film" section, I have a second, much shorter essay on a single, masterful work of screen comedy: "The Awful Truth and the Smallest Injustice in Film History". In the same section, Lisa provides a very fine analysis of AlainResnais's undervalued"La Guerre est finie". Please do check out all three of our pieces, and as always, thank you for your continued readership - particularly in this productively leaner time.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

This piece was originally delivered in an abridged version at the 2010 Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image conference in Roanoke, Virginia, under the title "Recasting Harry Callahan: Focalization, Epistemology and Discourse in Dirty Harry, Sudden Impact and Zodiac." Please be advised that this essay contains multiple spoilers.

Produced in the aftermath of two landmark rulings of the United States Supreme Court under chief justice Earl Warren, 1964’s Escobedo vs. the State of Illinois where in essence the court decided that the sixth amendment right to legal counsel applied not only to post-indictment questioning but to pre-indictment interrogations, and 1966’s Miranda vs. the State of Arizona, which held that statements procured through interrogation were valid only so long as it could be demonstrated that the suspect had willingly waved his or her fifth amendment right not to incriminate his or herself, Don Siegel’sDirty Harry (1971) fuses the concern raised in the dissents to both rulings that the impediments that each placed on criminal investigations would lead to greater rates of acquittal, with a fictionalization of one the United States’ most notorious series of unsolved murders, those of the so-called “Zodiac” killer.

Siegel’s film opens with the killer’s point of view, aided by a high-powered scope as he follows his bathing, soon-to-be victim. With the film’s incipient killing complete, Siegel then introduces us to detective Harry Callahan, played here as in the film’s four sequels by Clint Eastwood. Callahan rapidly establishes his investigative acumen, as he locates the source of the assassination that the introductory passage carefully mapped for its viewer. Callahan determines the shooter’s position almost immediately, which leads to his discovery of both evidence in the form of a shell-casing, and also the killer’s letter. In short, the viewer is made to feel confident from the outset that Callahan will be able to locate the still unnamed assassin. This crime will not remain unsolved, unlike its real-life model.

With the aforesaid letter signed by the Zodiac’s astrological equivalent “Scorpio,” Siegel makes explicit his San Francisco-based film’s connection to the recent Bay Area murders. Siegel, however, unlike as in the real-life, unsolved ‘Zodiac’ murders does not keep his killer’s identity hidden for long, but rather shows Scorpio’s face on-screen twenty minutes into the film’s 102-minute duration, with the police department’s want ad response to his demands in his possession and conspicuously circled in order to make his identity clear. Hence, Dirty Harry will not be about discovering the killer’s identity, but rather will focus on his apprehension by the San Francisco P.D., and of course, by 'Dirty Harry' specifically.

As the sequence in which Scorpio is identified proceeds, Siegel adopts a strategy of parallel editing, with the film alternating between Scorpio on another rooftop, following the film's cold open, preparing for a second assassination, and the police department attempting to locate the shooter by helicopter. Thus, Dirty Harry diverges from said set-piece, where the film adheres solely to Scorpio’s point-of-view (which of course follows from the fact that murder is unexpected). In the subsequent passage, with the police department now cognizant of Scorpio and his written threat, the question becomes whether the police will be able to spot and stop Scorpio before he claims another victim. As such, Siegel’s film signals the influence of D. W. Griffith, whose cross-cutting strategies in The Drive for Life(1909), The Lonely Villa (1909) and most prominently and notoriously The Birth of a Nation(1915), provide a pattern of saving victims from bodily harm and from crimes that are in the process of being perpetrated. As in these Griffith films, the victim is saved; Siegel extends this pattern to a second rooftop assassination attempt, with Harry and his partner on the lookout for Scorpio whom they suspect may be planning to kill a Catholic priest as per his written threat. Again, Scorpio’s crime is thwarted, though once again he escapes from the rooftop. Thereafter, Scorpio abducts the teenage Ann Marie Deacon. This successful crime, as is the case with a second murder that Scorpio commits immediately after his first thwarted assassination, significantly does not appear on screen.

Callahan, however, receives a tip as to the suspect’s whereabouts, prompting the officer and a police associate to set off in search of Scorpio - with Deacon's life presumably hanging in the balance. In this way, the narrative enacts a very Griffithian ‘last minute rescue’ scenario, which we as spectators understand will not wait for Callahan to secure a search warrant from the district attorney; time is indeed his most pressing obstacle. With Callahan thus scaling a locked fence, Siegel cuts to Scorpio as he watches his police adversary arriving. Consequently, Siegel not only diminishes our hope that Callahan will be able to capture Scorpio, but indeed we become worried for the officer’s safety as it is Scorpio who possesses knowledge of both of their locations. With Callahan arriving in Scorpio’s empty living quarters, however, Siegel utilizes off-camera sound to indicate that the latter is fleeing. With this, Callahan sets off in pursuit of the suspect, with our desire for the murderer’s apprehension and Ann Marie Deacon’s safe return, restored. Callahan thus chases Scorpio through a shadowy football stadium, eventually tracking him onto the turf, at which point he signals to his associate to flood the field with light.

Frozen in the spotlighting, the visibly limping Scorpio raises his hands over his heads. Harry, however, rather than continuing to chase the serial killer, who notably beat the officer severely during a prior, pre-arranged ransom-drop, exacts a bit of extra-legal revenge by discharging his firearm at the immobile Scorpio. Of course, we as viewers can find a degree of satisfaction in this personal act and understood fully that if Harry wanted to kill Scorpio, he certainly would have done so. Still, Callahan’s shot, and his subsequent coercive, on-field interrogation where he extracts Ann Marie Deacon’s location – she is dead as the viewer will see subsequently – lead to Scorpio’s release on the grounds dictated by the two Warren court rulings. While at this juncture we can certainly go along with Callahan’s assertions that Ann Marie Deacon’s rights supersede those of Scorpio’s, and that he was right to search for the abducted girl even if this meant acting beyond the law – we can agree with his sentiment that the law is "crazy" – his personal score-settling is less easy to excuse, even if we as viewers can find pleasure and even justice in his actions. Dirty Harry does introduce at least a degree of ambiguity.

From Callahan’s employment as a bagman in his first attempt to rescue the missing Deacon, Scorpio manipulates the San Francisco P.D. Harry is offered the same job after the latter hijacks a school bus, a detail that Siegel and his screenwriters take from the real-life Zodiac case, though in reality the Zodiac’s threat proved hollow. In this second instance, Harry declines the request of City Hall, asking when they are going to stop messing around with the killer. The mayor objects that he has given his word and that Scorpio will not be “molested.” Thereafter, Harry proceeds to the drop-off spot, leading to a concluding showdown that visually echoes the Western showdowns that he instantiated in the works of Sergio Leone. With the police department failing in not only protecting its citizenry, but in pursuing justice for the Scorpio’s victims, Callahan faces off with Scorpio as the latter holds a boy hostage. Again demonstrating his extraordinary aptitude with his Magnum revolver, Harry shoots Scorpio allowing the boy to escape. As he looms over Scorpio, Harry waits for his adversary to draw first in order to justify his shooting. Seeing how comprehensively he has manipulated the police force, we too want him to make this mistake, to test Harry, and for Callahan to achieve both justice for the dead and to take Scorpio off the streets permanently. We get the ending we desire, after which Harry tosses his badge in the adjacent pond upon finishing the job. With this concluding gesture, he shows his contempt for a criminal justice system that has become ineffective in achieving its primary purposes: to secure justice and keep its citizenry safe.

David Fincher’s true crime adaptation of Robert Graysmith’s treatment of the ‘Zodiac’ killings, simply entitled Zodiac(2007), declines to arrive at both the same vigilante solution as Siegel's film and also its cynical conclusion. Rather, Fincher’s film focuses on the legally undecided question of the serial killer’s identity, mooring itself to the San Francisco P.D.’s investigation of the Bay Area killings, and to cartoonist and author Graysmith’s extra-curricular investigation of the cold case. In Fincher’s hands, the ‘Zodiac’ killings speak less than they do for Siegel to a criminal’s ability to manipulate the media, politicians and law enforcement and to the impediments placed on officers to secure evidence and ultimately achieve justice following Escobedo and Miranda. Justice, in fact, proves a secondary concern at best for Fincher, who instead is more interested in deciphering the mystery of the Zodiac’s identity, and in the epistemological question of whether it is possible to know the Zodiac by sight, whether by looking into his eyes he reveals himself to be a serial killer. Zodiac is about knowing the killer’s identity; it is not about saving the public from a monster, attaining justice for those whom he has victimized or critiquing a criminal justice that has made both more difficult, which is to say those concerns that were most current during the Zodiac’s activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s – the time of Dirty Harry’s release.

In facilitating the film’s primary epistemological questions, Fincher assiduously masks the killer’s identity during three sets of murders, as well as a fourth abduction and possible attempted murder. In three of the four, the Zodiac strikes at night with Fincher and director of photography Harris Savades’s low-key cinematography concealing the killer’s identity in the enveloping shadows of their set-ups. In the fourth, the killer’s one daylight homicide, the Zodiac himself conceals his identity, wearing a suit of his own design. In each instance, the Zodiac left witnesses, whether it was the two men and the younger mother that he failed to kill, or the two young boys and two police officers who saw the Zodiac fleeing from the taxi cab killing. From their testimony, Fincher reconstructs probable scenarios for each of the murders. In this sense, all of the violent crimes perpetrated or attempted on screen are focalized through the evidence provided by the witnesses, with shots depicting the victim’s point-of-views included in the set ups. Indeed, it is for this reason that a fourth, Christmas 1968 double homicide is excluded: it is one crime that, though incontrovertibly the Zodiac’s, no witnesses were left. Even so, Fincher does conceal at least one piece of evidence, the 1991 identification of primary suspect Arthur Leigh Allen by the surviving victim of the July 4th, 1969 homicide. In this instance, Fincher does not stick solely to what we know – or think we know – about the crimes, but instead preserves the film’s primary dramatic question: who is the Zodiac? Fincher delays his film’s answer.

In so doing, Dirty Harry’s early, driving concern of capturing the Bay Area serial killer is deferred in Zodiac, inasmuch as his identity not only remains un-established, but as he remains (unlike Scorpio) unrecognizable, even to the film’s viewers. The viewer is not placed in a privileged position here, where we are able to root for the police to discover what we already know – and thus to capture the killer on the loose, which thanks to Dirty Harry’s regulation of information becomes our primary desire as viewers. Rather, until at least the film’s introduction of a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence that implicates Arthur Leigh Allen, we wait for the killer’s identity to be confirmed. Indeed, we know only as much as the Zodiac case’s investigating officers Dave Toschi, the real-life inspiration for Harry Callahan, as well as for Steve McQueen’s 'Bullit,' and his partner, William Armstrong, know. Zodiac restricts its narrative to the known evidence of the case. And even after Fincher establishes the likelihood of Allen’s guilt - though there is not enough hard evidence for an indictment - a second suspect, Rick Marshall, is introduced into the narrative. While Marshall does not remain the focus of narrative interest for long, his inclusion, so late in the narrative, emphasizes the continued unsolved nature of the Zodiac murders.

By this point, the film’s narrative has shifted from its focus on the Police Department’s investigation, to that of cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who first comes into contact with the case while working at the San Francisco Chronicle. As with Toschi years earlier, Graysmith ultimately concludes that Allen is the likely killer, thanks in part to additional pieces of circumstantial evidence that he has since uncovered, independent of the police investigation. With a reasonable degree of certainty that Allen is the Zodiac, Graysmith pursues his own desire for resolution, where he first discusses his theory with Toschi, and then tracks down Allen, into whose eyes he stares. As he has stated earlier in the film: “I need to know who he is. I need to stand there, look him in the eye.”

In Zodiac, criticisms of Dirty Harry and the police work in Siegel’s original are reserved for the 1971 picture’s real-life inspiration, Dave Toschi, who again cautions Graysmith with an “easy Dirty Harry” after his insistence that he cannot “prove” the cartoonist’s theory. In an earlier meeting again with Graysmith, and this time outside a departmental screening of the Siegel film, Toschi responds to another officer’s jab that “that Harry Callahan did a hell of a job with your case” with “no need for due process, right?” spoken almost beneath his breath. That the screening and Toschi’s response come immediately after the news that the District Attorney lacks the evidence to prosecute Allen only reinforces Toschi’s portrayal as an anti-Dirty Harry. In Fincher’s rehabilitation of the real-life officer, Toschi objects first to the suspect’s denial of rights, to which we will remember Callahan responds that he’s “all broken up,” and then to Graysmith’s claim that one can know the truth without proof, meaning without legally admissible, non-circumstantial evidence, which again led to Harry’s response that the “law’s crazy.” For Toschi, the law is paramount, as accordingly are legal rights; as such, Fincher’s film insists on the equal protection that the constitution gives to all citizens, even to those accused of crimes. Whereas for Callahan, it is natural rights, namely that of life, which is of foremost importance, and which supervene when the criminal justice system fails to adequately preserve the aforesaid right. He seeks a primordial form of justice that restores equality between the killer and the killed, though again only after he is prompted by Scorpio’s draw.

With justice reserved for the legal system in Zodiac, the narrative’s lack of non-circumstantial evidence dictates that justice does not receive serious consideration in Fincher’s film. By comparison, justice is emphasized in the director’s previous serial-killer classic Se7en(1995), albeit in the degraded form of a mass murderer’s impetus for choosing his seven victims. That is, Kevin Spacey selects his victims on the basis of their transgressions of the seven deadly sins, thereby assuming a divine authority in enacting his crimes. While there is in other words a perversity in Spacey’s enactment of justice certainly, Se7en does not emphasize the necessity that he be brought to justice, in part perhaps due to guilt of all but one of his victims. When he does break his pattern and kill Brad Pitt’s wife, the latter becomes the executioner, thus completing what Spacey insists is “masterpiece.” While it is not this precisely for Spacey’s killing of the innocent Paltrow and her unborn child, the film’s interest resides in these killings being brought to their completion, in the Seven Deadly Sins each receiving their homicidal translation. Extra-legal justice is nothing more than the killer’s alibi and Brad Pitt’s ultimate transgression - his wrath. (Zodiac, it is worth noting in conclusion, provides a sort of revision of Se7en, as its real-crime, serial killer subject procures a form that in its very looseness separates itself from the tight, pre-determined construction of Se7en and its deadly sins.)

Dirty Harry’s third sequel and the first and only directed by Clint Eastwood, Sudden Impact (1983), manifests a similar ethos of self-revisionism. In this instance, as in the first ‘Dirty Harry’ sequel, Ted Post’sMagnum Force (1973), Callahan is not the agent of vigilante justice, but rather his or her pursuer. In Sudden Impact, Sondra Locke playsthe film’s vigilante, whose identity Eastwood delays until after the film’s second homicide, which like the first, results in a man shot in his groin and head in the front seat of his automobile. Eastwood shows both killings on camera, with Callahan arriving on the scene of the second.

Immediately after the second homicide, Eastwood discloses Locke’s identity as Jennifer Spencer, a modern artist whose work corresponds closely to a number of nineteenth and twentieth-century models including those of the German Expressionists, the mid-century Abstract Expressionists, and in one very distinctive instance pictured here, to Edvard Munch’sThe Scream. The last of these comes after a series of similarly enacted homicides that by this point in the narrative signals her growing awareness not only of the anguish which her gallery show “Dark Visions” depicted previously, but of the darkness inside her. Spencer, the artist, is nothing if not self-aware, which stands in distinct contrast to Eastwood’s Callahan.

Between the first and the second of Spencer’s homicides, we see ‘Dirty Harry’ threaten a group of recently acquitted criminals after they taunt him on an elevator, stop a robbery by shooting and killing all but one of the assailants in the presence of a coffee shop’s innocents, and lastly accuse a mafia don in the presence of his just married daughter. The first and third of these correspondingly prompt to retaliatory acts that culminate in Harry jumping from a full automobile as it careens off the end of a peer and shooting three mob hit-men who stalk Harry across a dimly lit boardwalk. By the time Harry is reassigned to a case in rural San Paulo, Harry’s body-count is approaching double digits - to Jennifer’s two. He is, it goes without saying, far less self-aware than the murderess, with whom he is conflated throughout the remainder of the film.

To take just one example of this comparison, Eastwood presents Spencer stabbing a mirror in her home following another of her homicides. This in fact is the second consecutive mirror she destroys as she fires her handgun at the first immediately after the crime. In both instances, Eastwood suggest that Spencer cannot abide this clear, unblemished view of herself; she is, to push the metaphor, broken, which we see not only in these mirrors but in the paintings, one of which is reflected in the second of the two reflective surfaces. Callahan, on the other hand, has no such self-awareness as he tracks the killer whose identity he will only later realize; while his actions bring about more deaths than do hers, and while those people he kills are no more deserving than Spencer’s victims (as we come to learn), he seems to lack her internal struggle.

Indeed, we have by this point discovered the source of Spencer’s anguish and her impetus to kill. Jennifer and her near comatose sister were raped by a group of San Paulo townies during a party held in the recent past. At this point it is worth mentioning that Sudden Impact’s transposition to small-town America provides the film with one of its significant points of revision of the vigilante formula – not only Dirty Harry, but Michael Winner's 1973 Charles Bronson-vehicle Death Wish are paradigmatic examples of the vigilante’s response to urban social decay – as it does in its selection of a female as the agent of justice. Here we have the crime itself, followed by her final confrontation with Eastwood following a shootout that leaves that last of her attackers dead.

Thus, unlike the crimes in Dirty Harry and Zodiac which we experience as they unfold, here the precipitating crime comes in the victims past, and is filtered through her subjectivity. Then again, there is never any sense that she is misremembering, which the reactions of those she kills reinforces; it becomes clear by the film’s end that her account of events is accurate. Thus, Eastwood’s choice of subjectivizing the rape speaks again to his construction of the victim’s interiority. If Harry Callahan speaks and acts for the victims with the criminal justice system providing inadequate – in part thanks to his own actions – Jennifer Spencer, while acting on her sister’s behalf for the same reason, also is acting for herself, out of her very real need to experience satisfaction for the crimes, for there to be justice, with her assault remaining unprosecuted thanks to the fact that the chief of police’s son was one of the perpetrators.

As Spencer puts it, speaking for her director, “there is a thing called justice.” Sudden Impact in other words conforms to Dirty Harry’s insistence on the existence of natural law. In this way, Sudden Impact does not opt for what I would argue is Zodiac’s easier revision of Dirty Harry – namely it does not remove justice from the equation by making the killer unknown. While the real-life details of the Zodiac case compels this revision, what it really shows is that Dirty Harry does not adequately represent the ‘Zodiac’ killings, which it would seem was never really in question. Rather, what the appearance of that film in the midst of the homicides really spoke to was a fear that the apprehension and prosecution of criminals had been made needlessly difficult out of a fear of police misbehavior.

At the same time, in Eastwood’s film there is a price to be paid for securing justice outside the law. While Harry ultimately manages to let Jennifer walk, pinning the crimes on one of the dead criminals, the film’s insistent presentation of her interiority highlights the emotional scarring that results from her vigilante acts. The broken mirror into which both she and Harry look suggests that they share this internal state, though only Jennifer demonstrates an awareness of this, thanks again to her anguished self-portraits. In terms of the film’s focalization, Eastwood alternates between Harry and Jennifer, who again largely produce the same results, though it is only Spencer’s mind that we truly know, thanks to both her flashbacks and also her painting. It is the artist, like Eastwood himself, who is cognizant of the toll of justice.